


A Bit Of A Twist

by Neshephel



Series: The Jones Saga [1]
Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Breakdown making dad jokes? it's more likely than you think., Gen, Starscream is a snide little shit, Will add tags as the story progresses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:40:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25498495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neshephel/pseuds/Neshephel
Summary: Takes place after the canonical timeline for TFP. Throw a batshit human into the mix, rewind the clock, toss in a couple OCs, some additional events, and watch the madness unfold.
Series: The Jones Saga [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1847176
Kudos: 12





	1. Reset

**Author's Note:**

> Decided to sit down and rework this story, as I wasn’t satisfied with what I put out initially.
> 
> Don’t mind me, can’t decide on story titles yet.

Heavy brain fog made the alarm bells slow to go off when she awoke. There was no textured thermoplastic nylon handle in her hand. There was always an M9 bayonet under her pillow, a bare minimum of security she couldn’t sleep without. The complete absence of that heavy knife was disturbing. Her bedding was different, head on a pillow so flat that it was folded in half for any sort of cushioning. She was in a thin sleeping bag on cold, hard flooring, something she hadn’t resorted to in years.

Brain fog aside, her reflexes were sharp as ever. The hard thunk of her head against the roof of the ventilation duct was more striking than the pain. Where was her knife?

The dimly-lit, dark metal around her was recognizable in an instant. She was back aboard the Nemesis, somehow—the same warship that had crashed on Cybertron six years ago. This was some sort of strange lucid dream—not that she’d ever had one to know. It had to be, and yet she was in such a rush to see for herself that she kicked the duct grate that acted as her door right out of the wall.

A startled Starscream stared back, only to squint in bemusement. “Looking for Knock—“

“What’s the date?”

Such an odd question struck the already frazzled seeker by surprise. “Pardon?” Something had seriously disturbed the human—her hair was wild and unkempt copper, and she even lacked boots.

“The date! Month, year, y’know?!” She all but snarled at him, spittle flying from the lipless side of her mouth as fervent desperation to get all the information she could consumed her. “Fucking useless!” The human vanished into the underfloor, leaving the seeker to question if what he’d just witnessed had just happened when he wasn’t fast enough to respond.

Had she really just grown the bearings to insult her commander overnight? It was a slap in the face compared to the manners she’d displayed upon her initial arrival. He managed to shake off the initial shock and chalked it up to the human having sucked up to avoid being hurled right back out the airlock. Perhaps Megatron truly had scrambled his processor with the latest thrashing.

It had all happened so fast, like a lake rising up to meet a rock when it eroded from the cliffside. Zusteller was left just as disoriented under the proverbial waves. She only managed to not stub her toes as she ran by muscle memory of the hall underfloor’s layout. She hadn’t even put on socks. Clothing was the last thing on her racing mind, though thankfully she had army pants and a tank top on at the very least. 

It was subconscious, making a beeline for the bridge. Thankfully, she was intercepted just outside the doors by a ghost before she could make a fool of herself. Two yellow optics speared her periphery, one more than there should have been, though she saw the bemused smile first. There was so much to take in that her brain was hurling the information out of the immediate way to hit her later when she had the time to think without the shock impeding her.

“Whoa, Bitlet, where’s the fire?” That all too familiar voice was in the background, the registration of the sensation of something above lukewarm against her left servo.

She was stuck staring down at a whole and intact left forearm splayed against one of Breakdown’s fingers. That was wrong. It was long gone, the memory of that loss more than a little hazy. The painful aftermath was more acute.

The wrongness froze her. Everything was wrong. Nothing was what it should have been. Why?

Perhaps it was the sheer absurdity or impossibility of everything that kept her from delving into hysterics. Perhaps it was the shock. Maybe she was already hysterical. Her brain was a stirring pot of so many things that she couldn’t parse right now.

“Don’t tell me Starscream tried to squish you, the mech can barely move!” Came that voice again.

Everything was wrong, but she was forced to rip away from gawking at misplaced reality. The present she’d been dropped in was flowing parallel to the past she was familiar with, so she needed to go with the flow until she could figure out what the hell was going on.

She sounded like she’d run a marathon when she’d finally ripped free of her hurricane of thoughts. “No—no fire. I just…” Shit, what the hell could she even say? She wasn’t even sure what was going on. “…had a bad dream, I think.”

The human didn’t need to look up to know the looks she was getting. Fortunately, Breakdown wasn’t one to press what would lead to an awkward feelings talk, and Knock Out didn’t usually want to indulge it unless absolutely necessary.

Zusteller hadn’t even realized they’d returned to the medbay until she heard the doors slide open. She raised her head from her left forearm to an unimpressed Starscream. Breakdown lowered her to the duct near the floor so she could return to her makeshift quarters. She disappeared into it with little hesitation while the seeker made a snippy comment about her to his medic. 

She had a sleeping bag, a sad pillow, her polished army boots, an army backpack, and the flecktarn jacket draped atop it to her name. Good thing she hadn’t gotten comfortable with a cushy domestic life. She never kept anything she couldn’t leave with in less than a minute.

Right, onto business. The first order of that was to get her shit together and look presentable. Socks, boots, neckerchief, jacket, and fingerless gloves. Along with that ensemble were three knives of varying size and an aggressive-looking 9mm revolver that fit perfectly in a modified shoulder holster on the inside of her jacket. The right side housed a four-inch boot knife. The flecktarn jacket that hid them was baggy enough to hide her weaponry from the average person. That, and the large and numerous pockets sewn into it were more than a little convenient.

Inhale, exhale. Repeat until death or the shock subsided.

Wild copper hair was brushed out and braided to sit over her left shoulder as it was supposed to. All of this was a faded but ever-familiar routine. Zusteller could almost think she really had just had a weird, vivid nightmare.

She stared at her left forearm, just standing there like a dunce while clenching and unclenching her hand, turning her palm to and fro over and over. Through the swirl of chaotic thoughts came the memory of her laptop in her bag, a tool she could use to better situate herself.

Friday, June 17th, 2011.

The device beeped to remind her that the battery was at seven percent. She folded it shut and slid it back into the backpack. Whatever hundreds of questions her brain had all shut up at once with a single realization.

She had less than 24 hours before Breakdown was maimed by M.E.C.H..

What she’d do, she already knew. Well, she wouldn’t sit by and do nothing, that was for sure, but it had cost her a forearm last time thanks to a truck and a tree. The aftermath had left her out of the game for months. She couldn’t afford that, this time around.

One little human, outgunned by so many others. Those odds were just as horrible as the first time around. Megatron wouldn’t lift a finger to rescue Breakdown, and Starscream would arrive after Bulkhead with eradicons to retrieve him. He couldn’t wait that long. She needed to get him out far sooner. The problem was that she had no way of managing that on her own.

Wait, maybe she did. Not alone, but…

But. What a lovely and horrible word.

Steeljaw had unwittingly handed her a trump card, assuming she managed to pull off what he had. She knew where to go, but whether or not she’d be heard out was in the air. If not, then she’d be putting everyone at risk.

They’d die if she did nothing, so to hell with debating about it. This was make it or break it. She’d succeed or die trying. There was no alternative.

Zusteller adjusted her jacket, a loose plan she could modify on the fly in mind before she was even fully situated. Reality hadn’t hit her as reality, if it even was that. It was best to not get philosophical about that unless she really wanted to make her head hurt.

She had a potential plan. Well, that, being dressed, and having mostly everyone alive. That’s what she had going for her. She needed to keep things that way.

Zusteller was as presentable as she could be. Starscream would still call her ugly and cite the burned off half of her face as the reason if nothing else, but that was on his distain for humans. He had plenty of reason to, not that he knew it fully yet.

Silas and Airachnid would be two people she’d knock off the roster as soon as possible. Maybe she’d be able to get rid of the former while rescuing Breakdown. If not, his time would come eventually. She’d rather not wait that long, same as she’d rather not wait for Airachnid to knock the insecticons and half the crew off.

There was no sense worrying about it yet when she hadn’t even gotten past the first hurdle. She didn’t even have a way to her destination yet. Getting a ground bridge would require some seriously convincing spiel of checking out an energon reading in treacherous terrain. The Mackenzie Mountains in Canada’s Northwest Territories counted as just that, as far as the average cybertronian was concerned.

Traveling there would be a chilly and miserable affair for any vehicon or eradicon. They would prefer to just take her word for it and squint a little so nobody got on their afts about it.

There was a deposit of energon a few hundred miles away that she could offer up without too many questions, provided no one looked into the logistics of how her short legs could make it that far in so little time. She’d have to report it as a glitch to cover her aft. They’d find that deposit next year, anyway and be able to chalk it up to weather interference.

She stepped out of the duct, far more collected than she’d started even if she was a long way from it yet. At least this time she was properly dressed and had some semblance of a plan in mind.

It was still unreal to see Breakdown alive and milling about. It felt like a fever dream to even look at him. Still…there he was. She was a mix of relieved and something she couldn’t yet identify. She shouldn’t have been anything but the former.

Wait, if this was the past, then she was almost a decade younger. The human paused and reached a hand up to feel the intact half of her face. She’d have forehead wrinkles just from the sheer amount of scowling in three years’ time. That meant she was back to sixteen and everyone seeing her only as an immature jokester. 

Before she was off, it was best to address the grey seeker in the room. If nothing else, it might mean less grief for her down the line. “Apologies for earlier, Commander Starscream. I’m not sure what came over me.” She knew what had gone down, not what would go down.

The seeker was clearly caught off guard, a moment of hesitation leading to a dismissive scoff. “Just see that it doesn’t happen again.” He was more exhausted than he let on, if he was letting it go so easily for the time being.

She had to stop to remind herself that she was going somewhere cold. That meant putting a sweater on under her jacket. It was the best she could do. She’d just have to work fast. June or not, the north could still be chilly under the right conditions.

“Where’re you off to in such a hurry?” Breakdown asked her when he saw her heading for the underfloor.

“Work.” She replied, making a break for it before anyone could stop her, not that they’d try.


	2. Hellbent

* * *

It was fourteen kilometres and three hours of travel before she would even bother trying to consider what she was doing. It was a mindless sort of desperation that shut down anything to do with processing consequences. Three hours was nothing on a solo patrol—she could walk all day and not have a single thought at all in that little head of hers. 

All she knew was that she was walking into death incarnate with little more than her wits and suicidal hope. Far from optimal to have just those, considering what was at stake, but not the worst. A huge canon would have been a little more comforting, for example.

What Steeljaw had released from these mountains had been a terrifying final sight diving down upon them before she’d awoken on the ship. The only thing she could compare it to was her and those autobots standing like Pompeiians when Mount Vesuvius had erupted in 79AD. They hadn’t even had a chance to catch up with him to find out where it’d come from. She only knew where to look for it based on timing and direction.

Here she was, just waltzing her way into the lion’s den with barely a second thought. This entire endeavor would more than likely end in disaster. Boy, she was really letting the single remaining brain cell she had shine through, huh? Well, on the upside, maybe having some hellbeast on the loose would set a few people straight. 

The big idea here was that Steeljaw had been able to sicc whatever he’d unleashed on Bumblebee’s group. That meant that it wasn’t stupid, which in turn meant that maybe, just maybe, she could reason with it. If she could do that, maybe she could strike a bargain with it. That is, if it didn’t take one look at the Decepticon patches on her shoulders and kill her on the spot for being human. 

Normally, she’d discredit Steeljaw as desperate enough to scramble for any foothold—which, he was—but what he’d brought upon them was far more than a Megatronus-tier blunder. 

A steep, steep five hour trek up the hillside and two hours of pouring rain later, she had to stop lest she walk right off a cliff. A sizable crater lay to one side of a small valley below. A crashed ship was at the heart of it, almost entirely consumed by nature. She couldn’t even tell which side it belonged to, and not because of the distance. Autobot and Decepticon ships and structures were radical opposites of each other. This ship looked like it had been half liquefied in orbit and splattered like a ball of mud when it had hit the ground. 

This was one Starscream had either never found or never logged into the Nemesis’ databanks. Maybe he’d just been terrified of what lurked within, or he didn’t want Megatron to have that kind of security the next time he tried to usurp him. It could have been a lot of things. Hell, it could have been all of the above. This was Starscream she was talking about.

Howling wind bit right through her soaked clothes with icy cold fangs. She scanned her surroundings for a way down. That mangled ship was deceptively silent despite what laid within. In fact, aside from the wind, the area was all too quiet. There should have been birds singing or crying at the very least, maybe chirping crickets.

The descent was far steeper than the ascent. It was only through years of scaling cybertronians quickly that she was even remotely confident. Having no rope or climbing gear was nerve-wracking purely for the distance from the ground. It was a mercy to only have to look far enough down for foot placement. 

Breakdown had his usual excellent timing by pinging her comm-link when she was right in the middle of a rough patch of terrain with few good footholds. “Z? You ain’t checked in for awhile. Everything okay?” 

“Oh, absolutely.” She said, right as her foot slipped on grit when she tried to brace on it. The only thing between her and a fall of several hundred or so feet were the tips of her right fingers clasping sharp rock for dear life. The line could have come across as sarcastic, in retrospect. Hopefully he’d take it as a deadpan. 

He heard the grunt over the line when she’d caught herself. “Where are you? You told Ryan you were checking out an energon reading.” 

“Still checking it out. Almost done.” 

“You’ve been gone eight groons.” Oh, there it was. The subtle parental worry. “Bit long for a quick scouting mission.” 

God, she’d almost missed that. “Just a patch of rougher terrain. Don’t tell me you’re actually worried about me, are you?” 

Man, if he could see her right now, she could only imagine the grounding she’d have gotten. It was weird, thinking of that fondly. She’d be grounded for the next six vorns and a pile of dust long before that time was up. 

“Didn’t we tell ya to go for the easy stuff? Those’re still hard for humans.” The underlying anxiety in his voice was obvious to her, let alone to any eavesdroppers. “I thought Knock Out told you before we came here.” 

Right, she was supposed to be a sixteen year-old kid, not twenty-six. She pushed the realization of how long ago that was to the back of her mind before her brain broke. “But the easy stuff is boring!” Yeah, sixteen year-old her would probably have said that. Now she just needed a bad pun in there somewhere. “Besides, there’re so many trees out here that anybody else would be stumped about directions.” 

“I’m not gonna tell Knock Out you’re somewhere you probably shouldn’t be so long as you finish up within the next fourteen breems and come back without a single scratch or glob of mud. You know how he is about the medbay.” 

Two hours? Might be doable. “Uh, can’t promise scratch or mud-free, but he knows I clean up well.” If she was alive once that two hour limit was up, she could worry about being grounded. “At least it’s not as bad as when you go mudding.” 

“Don’t you drag me into trouble, missy! It’s bad enough I’m technically covering for you already.” 

“Love you too, you big lug. See you in two hours.” She defied self preservation to cut the connection before adding ‘if I’m not at the bottom of this cliff faster’ became too great a temptation. 

The rest of the climb down was strenuous and nerve-wracking, to say the least. It was ironic that she scaled cybertronians like trees on the regular when she wasn’t the biggest fan of heights. To be fair, twenty feet was a big difference when compared to…however high that cliff was. 

That was the least of her problems right for the time being. Right. Zusteller turned her head in the direction of the ship. Now, onto business. 

Fortunately for the last stretch of her trip, it was mostly just gradual downhill until the crater. The worst thing leading up to that point were the tree roots. She had to take extra care to not snag on them, but even then, an extra spiteful one caught the toe of her boot when she was very nearly at the bottom. She trudged on with a bloody nose and torn left sleeve. She had a minor cut on her arm that reminded her that her sixteen year-old self had no Decepticon tattoo yet when she checked. At least the sleeve rip was below her shoulder patch. Those had been a hassle to make.

She looked up after wiping mud from her hands onto her pants. A servo, partially melted and looking like it had been shoved through a liquid hull, reached out toward her. She didn’t make any sound of surprise, merely frozen on the spot out of surprise. She took a slow step back, eye glued to the macabre sight. “Right. Crashed ship? Dead people. Makes sense. I shouldn’t be surprised.” 

Then again, it wasn’t often a ship hit the Earth like an egg being slam-dunked onto a tile floor. That tended to make the usual corpses that came with it a little extra…zesty. Yeah. That’s what she’d call what she was seeing. She couldn’t imagine what the inside of the ship must have looked like. 

A half-melted rip in the hull was her entry point. It looked like massive talons had raked open that part of the ship. Zusteller patted her pockets for a light source once inside. She only had a Zippo to work with instead of the flashlight she was used to in future. Contrary to what video games portrayed, lighters were very inefficient sources of light. She was lucky to be able to see four feet in front of her. Hopefully, past-her had just refilled it. Zippos didn’t usually come with a rubber seal to keep the lighter fuel from evaporating within days. She hadn’t gotten around to jury-rigging one until about a week before Breakdown’s ticket was punched. 

She brushed past that hazy recollection in favor of preventing it from happening again. The world outside peered in through every crack and melted hole in the ship’s hull, the only thing bleeding in so she and her poor excuse for light weren’t entirely swallowed up by darkness. 

The rapid scrape of flint and steel to catch that flammable wick was far too loud in those ruins for comfort. Somehow, nothing stirred in the dark but dust. Zusteller stood there for what felt like an eternity, though it was probably only a minute or two. The only sound was the whistle of a breeze. She was already tiny in comparison to her preferred company, but this place left her feeling like an ant staring up at a size thirteen boot. 

She wasn’t sure what could warp a spacecraft literally built to withstand incredible temperatures so badly, apart from what had been diving down on them. Zusteller was really hoping whatever had done this was very, very long dead. It wasn’t hard to imagine one of the original cloned predacons doing this before dying out with the rest of that particular batch aeons ago. 

There had to be some kind of specialized fire-spitter in the species somewhere, right? What she’d seen seemed like a good candidate for that. Unfortunately, the Nemesis’ databanks didn’t have much on the species. She’d been able to read through everything in a few hours. 

On one hand, she’d been jealous that Cybertron’s equivalent to dinosaurs was dragons. On the other, she was relieved that Earth had something infinitely less dangerous back then. How lucky for everything that lived on both worlds that extinction level events had unfolded the way they had. 

Some places were entirely impassable. Entire floors had liquefied into each other, ceilings dribbling down onto floors to tease her with glimpses of the other side too small to squeeze through. A minicon would have barely fit in some of the more passable areas, let alone a regular cybertronian. Sections like that left her crawling in the pitch dark on her belly and trying not to drop her lighter when the terrain got worse. She was reminded of horror films where the protagonist would be grabbed by the ankles and dragged back into the darkness every time. She hated her imagination for working against her like that. 

The latest hallway—her best guess, as the damage only seemed to worsen the further she went—opened up into darkness. She tried holding her lighter up. It wasn’t enough to see the end. The floor and walls here were smooth, bent at an odd downward angle just in front of her. She had to step carefully, as apart from grooves to keep a foothold, she could slip down into the middle.

This seemed like the epicenter for whatever had happened here. This might have been a storage bay or flight hangar at some point, if not just a random hallway utterly annihilated by the heat. The place was too warped to tell where plates and supports were anymore.

Out of pure curiosity, she lit a road flare. She’d learned the hard way that they sucked as lighting sources in cramped space unless one wanted white-hot phosphorous searing their skin when it dripped onto them, but it should double as a good light source when used in place of a glow stick for whatever was down there. It took a couple strikes to get it going, the light initially blinding compared to her little flame. It did the trick, though.

For a lack of a better word, the entire place was bent as if it were a clay pot worked into a sphere by a ceramist. There were the telltale signs that this had once been perhaps a cargo bay, but whatever had caused this damage had melted through walls and turned the whole place into a fucked up attempt at modern interior design.

She tossed the flare down ahead without looking, still trying to figure out the temperatures required to fuse hallways and entire rooms. Most cybertronian ships were built to endure rough entries and even outright crashes with the chances of a crew surviving. She’d investigated enough of them to know that.

The red light of the flare was suddenly just wide, long slits projected toward the ceiling. Her face turned up to it in bewilderment, then down. It would seem a ventilation duct, complete with a grate, had survived all this somehow. Huh.

A rush of flames suddenly spat from the grate, thick black smoke following it. Zusteller leapt back from the edge. There shouldn’t have been any fuel left in the ship. It should have all burned up.

The fire only intensified, bursting from other ducts at the bottom of that pit. The human cast any ideas of staying to find out what was going on out of the way in favor of not winding up like this ship and its crew. She scrambled for the exit like a frightened cat, not caring for the bruises or cuts she’d be left with.

She cursed that lighter colorfully in her panic to light it. She cursed when she kept hitting her head, swore when she inadvertently punched a smelted support beam she didn’t see in the dark. The entire world groaned around her, dreading whatever she’d just woken up.

She tore herself free from the ship as if she’d just cut herself from the guts of a felled beast. Metal screeched mutedly behind her, great talons raking against the ship’s insides. It sent anything at the fringes of the valley fleeing for their lives, herself included. She was just unlucky enough to be the closest living thing to that ship when the upper hull glowed white and liquefied.

The jet of flames responsible shot high into the night until it died out suddenly. The human stood barely a kilometer and a half away, stopped in her tracks by the display. Something black dug itself from the inside of the ship, talons shredding the ruined hull with all the ease of a hot knife through butter. Had there not been a thick sheet of clouds hiding what went on below, that creature would have blocked out the moon.

Silas had called cybertronians titans, but a vehicon had nothing on this. She used to think Megatron counted as huge, but this thing was bigger than even Predaking with his wings stretched as far as they could.

The only light came from blazing vents, biolights and the two fiery optics that burned right through her.


End file.
